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Welcome to the Composition:Today New Music Concert Listings.
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This July the 100 piece TROSP Orchestra returns to Peckham Rye Multi-Storey car park to play John Adams' HARMONIELEHRE: a huge orchestral piece which Adams says was inspired by a dream in which he "watched a gigantic supertanker take off and thrust itself into the sky like a Saturn rocket".

La mer is an ambient, rich depiction of the ever-changing face of the sea. Originally composed for soprano Renée Fleming, Dutilleux said while writing Le temps l’horloge (Time and the clock), that for inspiration he ‘constantly thought of her voice’s character, of her power of lyrical expression’. Shéhérazade tells the tale of how one lucky maiden saves her head night after night by keeping the sultan enthralled with her stories of Arabian legends. Petrushka is the magical story of a straw and sawdust puppet that comes to life complete with human thoughts and emotions.

Change of programme
Please note the change of programme from some early listings

Libretto by Myfanwy Piper, after the story by Henry James, sung in English
Based on Henry James’s classic ghost story, Benjamin Britten’s masterpiece is a compact and chilling tale of the supernatural.

When an eager young governess is sent from London to look after two orphaned children in a remote English country house, she quickly discovers that the apparent idyll is not as it seems. Mystery envelops the house as sinister spirits from the past return to reveal a terrible secret of innocence lost, and we begin to wonder who is really possessed, the naïve young governess or the two strange children in her care?

This tense and compelling tale, combined with a scintillating score of radiant and haunting music, creates one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most gripping operas.

NI Opera, an ambitious and imaginative new company, has assembled a wonderful cast for this new production including Fiona Murphy, Andrew Tortise, Giselle Allen and Yvonne Howard.

The London Sinfonietta Academy Ensemble are joined by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and broadcaster Tom Service to present a BBC Proms Plus Portrait.

In Tocar, the title of which translates, from Spanish, as 'to touch, to play', Saariaho explores 'how two instruments can touch each other'. Meanwhile, Serenatas, a collection of five small pieces, the order of which is chosen by the performers, reflects on material from two of Saariaho's orchestral works Mirage and Notes on Light.

What would it be like if some unimaginable force were able to give material form to all our repressed emotions and thoughts? To resurrect, from our memories, people who once were close to us – as beings that confront us with our past and yet remain permanently out of reach and beyond our comprehension? What would happen to us as a result? That is exactly what Solaris is about, the famous novel by Polish science fiction author Stanis³aw Lem published in 1961, and which the German composer Detlev Glanert has now turned into an opera.

Solaris is the story of the psychologist Kelvin, who is dispatched to a space station which is orbiting the distant planet Solaris and on which strange things have been happening. Arriving on board, Kelvin is straight away warned about weird apparitions of the kind that relentlessly plague the crew members. None of the crew seem able to rid themselves of the "guests". It isn't long before Kelvin's personal phantasm appears in the form of his former wife, Harey, who killed herself at the age of nineteen, and who now starts revisiting him.

It is the planet's gigantic ocean which makes all these strange beings materialise, projecting the crew members' feelings of guilt into their lives once again, with persistence and indifference. Haunted by guilty memories, the rational scientist Kelvin is increasingly beset by irrational thoughts and feelings. In the end he is the one most deeply affected by the nightly visitations of beings which the plant bodies forth from the crew members' own memories.

Further performances
22 July - 11.00 a.m.
25 July - 7.30 p.m.

Introductory talk in the Festspielhaus will be start one hour before performance

The Hilltown New Music Festival is an international weekend festival of contemporary music, sonic and visual installations around the medieval castle keep in the grounds of Hilltown House, Castlepollard, Co.Westmeath.

Cool Fusion is one of the largest voluntary-arts initiatives in the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. It presents a series of four performances of new music and drama in historic London venues, celebrating the Olympics and Paralympics within London's vibrant culture. It is a partnership of London Composers Forum, Colchester New Music and Putney Writers' Circle.

Developed collaboratively by twelve composers and four writers, Cool Fusion uses wind orchestra, percussion ensemble, electronics and actors to weave a narrative of exceptional human endeavour. The performance is framed by historical episodes, from sandals to scandals, chariots to wheelchairs, outside track to winners’ podium. These are interwoven with works exploring the parallels between music and physical culture, in rhythms of pace, endurance, determination and achievement.

In the run-up to the world premiere at All Saints West Dulwich, Cool Fusion is working on a local outreach project with Kids' Company in Lambeth, exploring the Cool Fusion's themes through percussion, movement, visual art and English. Some of the results will be unveiled at the All Saints performance.

This performance and outreach project are supported by public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Quests for spiritual enlightenment and sensual discovery...memories of lovers, long ago and faraway...the incomparable strangeness of the everyday...
Ideas of the exotic are explored in all their mystery and potency in a programme of songs based on translations of Hindu, Spanish, Polish, Serbian, German and Gaelic poetry.

Endlessly innovative, John Cage's music defied category and blurred the lines between composition, improvisation and performance art. A theorist, philosopher and artist, he remained at the forefront of the American avant-garde until his death in 1992. The BBC SSO celebrates the centenary of Cage's birth with an evening of genre-defying performances. His tireless experimentations in sound questioned what music can be. As well as his Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra, the concert features music for the human voice, cassette players, percussion, and an amplified cactus played by the evening's curator and BBC SSO Principal Guest Conductor, Ilan Volkov.

The concert, which is also part of this year's Merchant City Festival, will be recorded for future broadcast in BBC Radio 3's Saturday late-night new music programme Hear and Now.

Cool Fusion is one of the largest voluntary-arts initiatives in the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. It presents a series of four performances of new music and drama in historic London venues, celebrating the Olympics and Paralympics within London's vibrant culture. It is a partnership of London Composers Forum, Colchester New Music and Putney Writers' Circle.

Developed collaboratively by twelve composers and four writers, Cool Fusion uses wind orchestra, percussion ensemble, electronics and actors to weave a narrative of exceptional human endeavour. The performance is framed by historical episodes, from sandals to scandals, chariots to wheelchairs, outside track to winners’ podium. These are interwoven with works exploring the parallels between music and physical culture, in rhythms of pace, endurance, determination and achievement.

For the Cecil Sharp House performance, Cool Fusion is running a local outreach project with Kids' Company in Camden, exploring the Cool Fusion's themes through percussion and other art forms. Some of the results will be unveiled at this performance.

This performance and outreach project are supported by public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Tickets: €40The Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association (ISSTA) announces a Call for Submissions for its second annual Convocation. The four categories includes Musical Works, Sound Art/Installations, Papers/Posters and Workshops.

Noise has become ubiquitous in most of our lives. As listening is an imaginative activity, so noise is a cultural construct, and has always been a presence in our music, communication and environment. From Russolo to the post-digital arts, noise has been increasingly accepted into the realm of artistic practice as valid and evocative material. This Convocation will draw upon both science and art, theory and practice, in exploring these spaces and focuses on how contemporary science and technology affects the concept of noise.

The second annual Irish Sound, Science and Technology Convocation (ISSTC) will be held August 1-2, 2012 at the Cork School of Music and St. John’s College in Cork.

The Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association (ISSTA) announces a Call for Submissions for its second annual Convocation. The four categories includes Musical Works, Sound Art/Installations, Papers/Posters and Workshops.

Noise has become ubiquitous in most of our lives. As listening is an imaginative activity, so noise is a cultural construct, and has always been a presence in our music, communication and environment. From Russolo to the post-digital arts, noise has been increasingly accepted into the realm of artistic practice as valid and evocative material. This Convocation will draw upon both science and art, theory and practice, in exploring these spaces and focuses on how contemporary science and technology affects the concept of noise.

The second annual Irish Sound, Science and Technology Convocation (ISSTC) will be held August 1-2, 2012 at the Cork School of Music and St. John’s College in Cork.

Cool Fusion is one of the largest voluntary-arts initiatives in the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. It presents a series of four performances of new music and drama in historic London venues, celebrating the Olympics and Paralympics within London's vibrant culture. It is a partnership of London Composers Forum, Colchester New Music and Putney Writers' Circle.

Developed collaboratively by twelve composers and four writers, Cool Fusion uses wind orchestra, percussion ensemble, electronics and actors to weave a narrative of exceptional human endeavour. The performance is framed by historical episodes, from sandals to scandals, chariots to wheelchairs, outside track to winners’ podium. These are interwoven with works exploring the parallels between music and physical culture, in rhythms of pace, endurance, determination and achievement.

We kick off with the London premiere of a new Fanfare by Ayrshire-born James MacMillan. Nicola Benedetti is in the spotlight for Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, Scottish-American composer Thea Musgrave gives the tuba its moment with her postcard from Loch Ness, while both tonight’s ensembles come together for one of Respighi’s glamorous Roman spectaculars

Holliger’s works are shot through with such ghost-like webs of reference, which contain his life’s experiences, dreams, but also music he has conducted and performed. That is why as an interpreter, he loves those composers who write porous music, music that remains fragile and fleeting. The two composers whose works are performed atSalzburg contemporary next to Holliger fit this description: the Pole Witold Lutos³awski and the German Bernd Alois Zimmermann. They suffered under fascism and communism, and only escaped death narrowly during their youth. They wrote music that questioned itself, confessed its own insecurity, but also bore the inscription of rebellion, even crying out at times. The most extreme work is presumably Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten, and it is a significant event that one of the most important operas since Mozart will now finally be produced in Salzburg.

Die Soldaten contains the full breadth of musical history, from the Middle Ages until today, from the most complex art music to folk music and jazz, a polyphonic web of references, stories, dreams and catastrophes, fed by a life experience that, in Zimmermann’s case, became so unbearable that he committed suicide. What is still relatively contained within the workings of the opera in Die Soldatenfinally breaks out openly in the Ekklesiastische Aktion: the tension of his times, the armament race, the bankrupting of all values, and Zimmermann’s own hopelessness are combined into one monumental gesture of desperation.

Alongside these works, Holliger’s Scardanelli-Zyklus seems like an ecclesiastical exercise. In 1806, Hölderlin, 36 years old at the time, sought refuge in the Tower in Tübingen, where he was to live for 37 years as a so-called madman, a recluse from the world, and only wrote occasionally in exchange for pipe tobacco, poems that are bright and cheerful and betray nothing of his former pains. He often signed them “Scardanelli”. Heinz Holliger was 36 when he began to study these late Hölderlin poems in 1975, and over the course of 15 years, he turned them into an ever-growing Scardanelli Cycle. This Scardanelli Cycle is another web into which Hölderlin’s life, his work, the flute music he played are woven.

Heinz Holliger’s second commission from the Salzburg Festival is a work for the winds and brass of the Vienna Philharmonic. During a serious illness, as he experienced breathlessness and a shortness of air – especially frightening to an oboist – Holliger conceived this music. We will hear sounds that might revive the Bunsen burner dream of Heinz Holliger’s boyhood.

National Youth Choir of Wales
Aelwyd y Waun Ddyfal
Musicians from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama
BBC National Chorus of Wales

Conductor Kristjan Järvi

Less a religious work than a theatrical happening, Bernstein's Mass receives its first complete Proms performance, conducted by one of its most ardent champions, and supported by a spectrum of talented Welsh children and adult musicians. Using a mix of highbrow and vernacular styles, Bernstein created a rich, quintessentially American score that has recently begun to emerge as a modern classic.

Juanjo Mena presents a major world premiere before offering his acclaimed reading of a sonorous yet dangerously eruptive Bruckner symphony.

First though, there's the emblematic love of Tristan and Isolde, expressed through music dark in sound and revolutionary in harmony. James MacMillan's works have enjoyed regular success at the Proms since the first performance of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie was given here in 1990.

As with Bruckner, MacMillan's communicative power is often associated with expressions of faith, and the unveiling of Credo, has been keenly awaited.